Processing serious flour size gold, working with super fine gold Options

[jackragusa]

I read a lot about folks working with a Blue Bowl on very fine gold, but I find it's much slower than just panning . Besides, the seriously fine golds also works it's way out of the blue bowl even under the slowest workable speeds. I have a large bucket of con.s I would love to go thru and I am sure the gold is there but the labor of just panning is just not worth the time. Other than a wave table or a shaker table which is obviously way too expensive to balance out, what choices do I have. Even if there was say an ounce to an ounce and a half of flour gold in the bucket, I would still be making only half of min. wage panning it and I do ok panning. But with panning this size gold, you have to go thru everything three times to insure you didnt miss anything. So please HELP....

[russau]

i wish i had your problem! haha i screen all of my material atleast to -30 mesh. i have screens down to -200 but dont use them very often. there is no 1 peice of equipment thatll do it all in one shot. my proccess is, after screening and setting them in seperate piles i like to remove the black sands from them with my magnet and set it of to one side aswell.i used to pan it down to "close enough" and put them into another container to run them across my small Miller Table . but now i just got my Gold Cube and im planning on running the cons across this and then see if i need to use the Miller table to finish up.i miss a lot of the real fine stuff(like most people!) the bigger peices are EZ to pick/pan out from the +20 or bigger material!going the extra mile and screening your material down to the smallest screen you have will help you speedup and retain more gold faster. i also have a Blue Bowl but i dont use it much. i expect a lot of use from my Gold Cube this year due to a lot of friends!!!:):)

[swizz]

I would still be making only half of min wage panning it...

Hi Jack and welcome to CP!
I'll get to the Blue Bowl advice in a sec but I feel the need to comment briefly regarding your "min wage" comment.
If you are prospecting with the intent of 'making money' and are numerically factoring in hourly labor, equipment, fuel, overhead, etc... I have practical advice for you: stop now.
Huge longshot unless you are a commercial or small scale miner.... even then, a wild wild wild crapshoot. Myself and many other claim owners can repeatedly attest this (CO, AK, CA, OR, MT, etc.. pick any Gold bearing state). Breaking even is considered a major success and VERY few even do that. If you don't own a claim and are just "winging it" or still in the prospecting stages of exploration your odds are even lower. If you're just playing at designated open spaces, parks, rec areas regulated by County jurisdictions or "Gold Club/Camp" claims offered by for-profit outfits... forget about trying to turn a profit entirely, that's not what they're there for (unless you're the owner raking in fees, lol). I don't want to discourage you but consider the realistic odds of actually turning a consistent profit (or ANY profit)... astronomical.
Bottom line is - you have to enjoy it. The real treasure is in the hunt for those that stick with it. I'll likely never get 'rich' from my claim but hit enough pockets, pickers, and the occasional nug to put a huge smile on my face (Woody and Pat find all the big stuff ). I also offer my claim to CP LT members (whom generally share the same philosophy) at no charge so they can experience the same simple pleasures (and keep everything they find of course). That's part of what makes it "worth it" to me. I don't have the audacity to operate under the pretense that I'm doing this for full blown profit. It is certainly a possibility that I could profit from my minerals... and definitely always on the plate, but that's not the burning core of my motivation. Solitude, friendships, learning, exploring, exercising my rights, sharing, and simply collecting. These elements factor largely into the reasoning behind my mining pursuits and I'm never disappointed.

Is this worth your time, minimum wage, or more than likely a small loss of investment? That's up to you. It's not worth the time or anything else of most sane people. It's worth my time and investments (of course I'm insane). Depends largely on how you measure the "worth" of your time. The worth of my time isn't measured in currency or minimum wage when it comes to mining... and certainly not during micron recovery. The micron recovery is more of a fun thing to do in the off season and yields a little "bonus flour Gold" to supplement the stash. Spock would tell me this behavior is "highly illogical" but Vulcans have no concept of "fun".... and they are a droll culture.

That being said...
Blue Bowls, tables, and some jigs are the best known ways to process fine concentrates and effectively recover micron (-100) Gold. None of these are extremely fast... nor are they 100% effective... no device is. Choose one, weigh the pros and cons based on your criteria, and lower your expectations a hair.
Most of the Gold I recover is larger that #30 so I don't really care about the smaller stuff as much. I personally use a slightly modified Blue Bowl setup for everything smaller than #30. I save those concentrates for the snowy days of winter and set up the Blue Bowl recirculating station in the living room while I watch football, golf, or Goldfathers, etc. In other words I process the micron cons during down-time.... when it's more "fun". Well... (for me) it's more fun than just sitting there and watching TV. I definitely don't care that the Bowl loses some microns, no big deal... I'd go mad trying to recover every microscopic speck. It is such a small and insignificant percentage to worry about... especially if you are skilled with the recovery device.
Stick with the Blue Bowl if that's what you have... you will get faster and better with it. Forget the instructions that came with it! There are some basic mods and techniques for the Bowl (several great threads on this site) that can make the process more efficient. I don't know of any small scale micron recovery equipment that is even moderately 'fast' at final separation. That is the downside of collecting and processing flour Gold. Larger Gold is much easier to process. If you only have access to locations that yield 99% flour Gold I would move along prospecting unless it is consistently in huge quantities... like in Nome or possibly the Great Lakes. You can find chunkier stuff than flour in Colorado if you know your way around. Overall easier to recover and separate... purty to look at too.

Good luck out there, and for God's sake have fun with whatever you choose to do!

[Woody]

well said Chris,

I agree 100%. A person has to look past the monitary aspests of prospecting. Often the greater value is found in the total experince. Woody.

[Caveman]

Well said, Chris! If you are only in for the monetary payback, you are going to be extremely frustrated, especially if you have my kind of luck! I have dropped a ton of cash this past year just getting into it, and have totalled out at .4 grams. However, the good people I have met, and the good times I've had more than break even as far as I'm concerned. The main idea is to have fun. My wife has even agreed to get out with me this year now and again.... when it warms up to the mid 80's! Yahoo!

As far as equipment - Pack in sluice (much modified), Gold hog Matting, 2" dredge, Gold Cube, Blue Bowl, and various pans and classifiers. I'm still learning, and this forum has been very helpful. I'm blue bowling my final concentrates next week, now that I have them all classified and pulled out the magnetics. Don't try to get all the flour gold - you can't. That being said, follow the techniques Chris has posted for the Blue Bowl, and you can reasonably expect to get decent results to at least -50, if not -100. (I'm still having major trubs with that - probably because I only have 1 good eye!). I pan the fine stuff ok, but I dump a lot over the edge too - I don't dare pan at the site! Anyhoo, there is a lot of fancy stuff out there that claims to help seperate out the fine stuff, all of it expensive, and most of it designed to seperate you from your money. I was fortunate to find this site before I bought into most of the gimmicks. I almost lost sight of the "have fun" aspect.... I just wanted to see a lot of color - and fast. Well, there is no fast. It's all time consuming, and trying to rush it is only going to lead to frustration. I'm trying to follow a friend's advice and only pan once, but......... well, I'm still learning to get the action right! I'm still having fun trying!

Take care and best of luck to ya!
Caveman

[jackragusa]

Boy you guys are tough. When I said min. wage, I was speaking in time spent, not money made. I was just expressing the long and slow process of extracting the fines from the black sands. You see where I work, the material is already at - 50 and smaller. It's very heavy black sands and never needs classifying. Now the gold is similar in size and usually a lot smaller. The gold cube after we tweeked it out catches all the gold very nicely. It just leaves us with about a gallon a days worth of super con.s We are considering on going in on a shaker table with a few of us. Now as for actually making money. You are all wrong. You can make money doing this and we do prove it every day. Nothing wrong with pulling a few grams a day playing on the beach. Now we dont get rich, but we certainly just dont do this for the love of moving hundreds of tons of sand each summer simply because we love redecorating our beaches. I was just looking for maybe a simpler way of extracting very fine gold ( -100 and smaller) from our seriously heavy black sands with out spending a fortune to do it.
Now as for the cube. It is a wonderful piece of equipment. With a little fiddling with, will retain 90 percent of any fine gold you might incounter on the beaches. No it's not perfect, but nothing is. I do recomend you buy the new topper attachment to add to the cube and always use the four stack version when working beach sands. Also, it's not a bad idea to up scale your pump to say 1500 gph on the cube and 2000 gph on the topper. I use two pumps and regulate them down to create a moderate flow thru out the system. But each circumstance is different. I am just saying "dont be affraid to experiment with your cube." You will be supprised with what you come up with. Now we work a beach on the west coast and those of us who regularly put time in on the beach have all paid for our equipment this summer with just our findings and then some....It's no secret of where to go, many go there and some do well and some do ok, but we all find good gold. It's just so dam small.....

[swizz]

Sounds great Jack.... good luck out there!
A shaker table should suit your operation well.

[Mitch Dickson]

It seems like I have stared in this movie :) Have you ever been to a sporting good store and seen the rows of fishing lures? Well those are made to catch fishermen, not fish! It is the same in a prospector's supply store. 90% of the products are ment to catch prospectors, not gold :)

Now I own at least one each of the latest gold catchers and seperation schemes. I have them all piled up in the back of a stall of the barn. Blue bowls, micro sluices, cubes, Mckirks, you name it, they are all substitutes, and poor at that, for a tumbler and some charged quicksilver. I do not advocate the novice to try amalgamation for you have to know the dangers and the methods to recover 100% of the HG. But for the serious professional, there is no other practical way.

But just getting the gold out of black sand is only half of it! A lot of that black sand is platinum and that is harder to remove than the gold. The one flaw in platinum that is in your favor is that it is paramagnetic. A regular magnet will remove the magnatite but will not lift platimun and hematite. A super Neodeym 52 magnet will lift platinum and you can seperate it that way, but you have to treat it with nitric acid to burn off the hematite leaving just the platinum. (there ain't nothing easy)

Now there are creeks (and beaches) where the platinum values exceed the gold values! The folks who buy your black sands are after, not only the -100 gold you leave in there, but the platinum you don't know is there as well. They will not be using a blue bowl to get it out :) Now if you don't have the tools and expertise, I suggest you sell the black sands after you have worked them for they do you no good just to set them around in buckets or tubs. "Maybe someday" never comes and a little money is better than none.

Now listen up! For first you have to capture the micro gold and platinum and you are probably not using a method that will do the job. Creeks that are alive with -100 gold are far more prevalent that creeks with pepper sized flakes. You must work the micron gold for there is where the value lies! And if you can't find and capture platinum are you walking off from creeks that are just as alive with -100 platinum but have very little gold? This ain't 1849, you have to change your thinking.

What you need is a device that costs less than $25, can be worked all day without a clean out, will capture all gold and platimun down to -300 mesh, and has a less than 3% return to tailings, and can fit in a backpack. Impossible? Not at all, in fact you may already own one! It is a LeTrap square gold pan, modified with a 1/2 pvc appliance that turns it into a fluid box. Just set her on the ground, raise the back to where she flows over the front riffles, hook up a small battery powered pump and feed the center with 1/4 classified material. Easy to hook up to a recirculator for working the desert as well. You will pile up your sluice boxes in the barn and give away your dredges as I did long ago. Don't forget to thank old man LeTrap for selling it for $15 LMAO! I hope this picture comes through.

C YA

Mitch

[swizz]

Hi Mitch and welcome to CP.
Good post...
The LeTrap boiler box creation is interesting. Are you saying that you use this as a final cleanup device.... or used as a field sluice?
If it's for field use..... a potential drawback for me would be production. I typically don't like to class down any further than 1/2". It's a time killer to hand-class down to 1/4" when you're trying move a lot of material. I'm guessing the unit runs off a 12V bilge pump. I don't doubt that it does a great job of recovering micron and fines. It just appears to be one of those things that takes a long time to process volumes of rough.
That being said, I'm kinda interested in the concept. I occasionally hit areas around the state that have primarily micron, maybe it would be useful for that. Most of my dig time however is at my claim. Not a lot of micron Gold there and high production is way more important, short season.

[russau]

interesting! Mitch it appears that youve made a fluidbed device utilizing the Sq. LeTrap pan!very interesting! sure would like to see it in more detail!

[Dypheron]

Like many hobbies the cost grows exponentially with return. Can you enjoy it and do well with a $20 investment in a pan and scoop? Sure. Can you spend a few thousand, have every widget and wizwam in search of the super fine stuff? Absolutely. The question to ask is what level of time, effort, and money are you willing to put into getting the super fine stuff? I'm sure that for every pinhead speck of gold I got last outing at least 2-3 of the same size blew right out with the tailings. That's fine. My return of investment comes from enjoying my time outside in the sun. What I see happening, at least with my outings in the future, is to not look for the so called "immediate return on investment" and gratification that comes from getting every speck out the same week I've pulled it from the river. Instead, I'll pull the large stuff, say 30+ out right away and save the 30- for processing over the winter with a beer and roaring fire. Chris is right when he mentions production rates in the field. I believe I ran about 5-6 buckets of classified material on our last outing to get a grain or two of color classifying down to 2-. I could probably get the same production going to 4- with some more effort, but the consensus is that 2- is really all you need.

As far as being wrong about making money prospecting, sure, it's possible. Let's take a minute to look at base cost for an average trip, not including the cost of all the equipment used. If you're lucky and live near an above average producing area then you might spend $10 on gas. Most of us are not that lucky and spend closer to $50 round trip. Insurance and basic services must be included too, those are a cost of maintaining your equipment to get to your area. Say, $40. You probably ate while you were there, maybe bought a pack of smokes for the trip, say $10 total. That's $100 you're down for one weekend. Obviously if you go out more than once a month the overall cost goes down, but we're looking at the average joe here on the forums here. That's roughly 2 grams of gold that you have to recover just to get back in the black. Now add in the one time cost for pans, shovel/pick/scoop,sluice,gold cube,blue bowl, etc and that adds up quick. Jackragusa, you mentioned working beaches on the west coast. That's all well and good for that location. You don't have a location in your profile so I can't comment on the cost of a trip to the coast, I think that's out of scope for the average forum user here. While we have members from all over the country (and world for that matter) the focus is really for prospecting in Colorado. I'm pretty sure that's the reason it's called Colorado Prospector. In any case, I don't think any member here, myself included, is trying to say that it's impossible to make money doing this. It's more about expectation management. It's a hobby. Hobbies usually cost more than what you get in return. You wouldn't normally expect a huge return on having a garden, going fishing, or putting together model cars, why would recreational and/or small scale mining be any different? 'Course, I bet the GPAA has something different to say on the matter with their fancy claims. Just my

[nuggetstosmall]

I use an 30 lb electric shovel to break up the dirt, then shovel into an earthquake shaker to bring the dirt down to 12 mesh. Then run it through a 60" sluice. The cons left are brought down to -30 to -100. Then blue bowl it, with a makeshift gold lab setup. Realizing that the blue bowl has to be LEVEL and that gold lab setup is perfect and you'll get 99%. Watch the yt videos on gold lab. I can run 20 5 gal buckets in a day, takes 2 hours to dig, 2-3 hours to run it through the sluice. The blue bowl, I take home and run the cons there. No pressure on the time and can really do a good job on it.